We are publishing an inofficial translation that has been sent to us, of a document of the NÚCLEO DE ESTUDOS DO MARXISMO-LENINISMO-MAOISMO that was published in the Newspaper ANOVADEMOCRACIA:
Portrait of the 1st Congress of the P.C.B., with its nine founders, representing 73 communist militants in Brazil
One hundred years ago, a delegation of nine communist militants (there were to be eleven, but two delegates did not make it to the meeting), representing 73 communist militants, who broke with anarcho-syndicalism, led a simple event, but one that would forever change the physiognomy of Brazil. In a modest house in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, the Communist Party of Brazil - P.C.B. was founded, initially called Communist Party - Brazilian Section of the Communist International (PC-SBIC).
Armed with a high proletarian internationalist spirit, the delegates took upon themselves to read and approve, one by one, the 21 conditions for the admission of Communist Parties to join the Communist International - Comintern. At the end, the nine proletarian militants emotionally sang the verses of The International, the world anthem of the working class.
Throughout its 54 years - until it was liquidated by João Amazonas' gang - revisionist, petty-bourgeois and bourgeois positions prevailed in the leadership of the Party, but not without the struggle of the most selfless, outstanding and firm of its cadres. Among them, Pedro Pomar stands out - as the highest communist expression when defining himself as Marxist-Leninist, Mao Tse-tung Thought -, Maurício Grabois, Ângelo Arroyo, João Batista Drummond, Carlos Danielli, Calil Chadi, Lincoln Oest, José Duarte, Carlos Marighella, Elza Monnerat, Osvaldo Orlando da Costa ("Osvaldão"), Dinalva Oliveira Teixeira and all the fighters fallen in combat or under torture in the Araguaia Guerrilla, among so many heroes and heroines of the class. And it must be emphasized that Luiz Carlos Prestes, despite having led the rightist positions in the party for 43 years, as he himself recognizes, when he made a public self-criticism for this error at the end of his life, broke with revisionism and defended the proletarian revolution until his last days.
In spite of the heroism and abnegation of so many and so many mass activists, militants, cadres and communist leaders, the P.C.B. could not achieve the goal pursued by its pioneers: to conquer Power for the proletariat and the masses, establishing a people‘s democratic republic and making the socialist revolution, putting an end to the reign of wage slavery of the proletariat and the forced labor of the peasants for the owners of the latifundium, sweeping away the imperialist semi-colonial domination and ending the oppression of the Brazilian nation. This, because in its history, the Party's left never managed to definitively impose itself, and the opportunist directions and deviations of all kinds prevailed and distinctively marked its history.
Deviations and revisionist positions that were condensed in not using the mass line as a method to know objective reality, to discover its laws and act in accordance with them in order to transform reality itself, as well as not applying the method of the two-line struggle by not understanding that the Party is a contradiction, in which womb the contradictions of the class of the society become manifested, and with that to give in the proletarian line and defend it from the other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois lines that, from time to time, rise up within the womb of the party. The two-line struggle, that is, to deal with divergences by applying the dialectical method of unity-criticism-transformation, taking revisionism as the main danger, because it is the offensive of the bourgeoisie in the ranks of the proletariat.
In politics, such fundamental problems have manifested themselves throughout its history due to an incorrect class analysis of brazilian society, mainly in not understanding what the national bourgeoisie is - taking as such the local big bourgeoisie, mainly its bureaucratic fraction, the one more linked to the state monopoly capital - and submitting to its direction, instead of seeking to establish the worker-peasant alliance, built on the peasant struggle for land under proletarian leadership - guaranteed through the communist party - as the nucleus of the united front of revolutionary classes in which could participate, under certain conditions of growth of the Revolution and greater intervention by imperialism, the left wing of the genuine national bourgeoisie (or middle bourgeoisie). In the same way, and as a consequence of this, there is a lack of clarity on which path to take for the revolution in the country, how and what line to establish for the revolutionary armed struggle, which in the concrete case of the revolution in the country, could only be the peasant war for the conquest of the land, and as part of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of a new type -New Democracy- and in the form of a joint democratic dictatorship of the revolutionary classes. Therefore, dictatorship led by the revolutionary party of the proletariat, maintained by the People's Army and exercised by the united front of the revolutionary classes, leads - the revolution - to Socialism uninterruptedly.
There are a lot of revisionist groups that claim the date as their own, among which stands out the PCdoB, the finished work of Mr. João Amazonas, a seasoned revisionist and traitor to the cause of Communism, with its rotten auxiliary line for the reaction, shameless support for the latifundium and the big bourgeoisie; like the academic group that goes by the name PCBrasileiro and its Trotskyist "Marxist theory of dependency", of contempt for the peasantry as a justification to wallow in reformism, legalism and pacifism. Not to mention others, like PCR, PCML, etc., all the Trotskyist groups, like the PCO; in short, all the electoralists, anti-armed struggle groups that do not have any identity with the purpose of the pioneers of 1922, nor with the communist heroes and heroines of this centennial of bloody struggles for Socialism and Communism.
Thus, and in a brief synthesis, the history of the P.C.B. can be understood in Three Stages, the Third Stage being divided into Two Phases.
Foundation and Infancy
The First Stage, from its foundation in the First Congress (March 25, 1922) to the beginning of the 1930s, spans a period of 10 to 12 years, during which its first three congresses were held, branded by Childhood and Ignorance of the entity of cadres concerning the Marxism-Leninism, what lead to deviations of right and of “left”. The context of the deep crisis of the system of exploitation and oppression in the country, in which uprisings with democratic inspirations against the oligarchy of the latifundium were exploding daily, could not be correctly taken advantage of by the party.
During this period, in 1925, the P.C.B. held its 2nd Congress. The scarcity and low diffusion of Marxist-Leninist literature, in addition to the weight of the anarchist traditions typical of a newly emerging workers' movement in the country on the party and in particular on its militants, produced an enormous effect on the formulations, whose content is right-wing, expressed in the thesis "agrarianism versus industrialism". Such thesis - that a few years ago the PCdoB redeemed as an "original application of Marxism-Leninism to the Brazilian reality" - clung to the appearance of the phenomena, since it identified in the strengthening of the big industrialists (mainly the bureaucratic fraction of the local big bourgeoisie) the advance of the bourgeois revolution. According to such formulation, the growth of industry -including and mainly the monopolist industry- produced, by leaps and bounds leads to the transformation of the "agrarian state" into the "bourgeois state (conclusion of the national-democratic revolution)"; it arbitrarily opposed the interests of the big industrialists to the interests of the owners of the latifundium , as if they were antagonistic. It was up to the proletariat to stay on the sidelines of these events and prepare to unleash the proletarian revolution when the "agrarian state" was supplanted by "capitalist progress”.
The Cominter severely criticized this formulation, which in many respects identified with the formulations of the Russian economists. Jules Humbert Droz, who at the time headed the South American Bureau of Cominter, pointed out in 1928 that the "industrial bourgeoisie is but one of the multiple faces of the latifundium", that is, "the industrial bourgeoisie is not opposed to the landowners, but its interests are intertwined with their interests" and that the big bourgeoisie "is, from its origins, linked to imperialism and unable to develop a bourgeois anti-imperialist revolutionary project". This will later be irrefutably proven with the betrayal of Getúlio Vargas - political representative of this bureaucratic fraction of the big bourgeoisie - to the democratic aspirations of the tenentist movement, in 1930, that in his government displaces the landowners from the hegemony of the old state,he did this by striking blows at the weakest oligarchs while respecting the general interests of the Latifundium and then reuniting with them, even giving them key positions in their government and maintaining and deepening the imperialist penetration of the country.
The party will struggle to assimilate Cominter's criticisms and rectify its errors. Through a closer link with the International, the P.C.B. succeeds in taking on a greater physiognomy of a Communist Party, produces hundreds of cadres, and becomes seriously committed to working for the Revolution.
Maturity and Growth
This is the beginning of the Second Stage of its history, from 1930 to 1960, a period in which the Fourth and Fifth Congresses were held, when the P.C.B. decided to put the struggle for power into practice and its left confronted reformism and the parliamentary path (soon ideologically grounded by the 20. Congress of the Khrushchevist USSR), regaining greater awareness of revisionism and the need to fight it.
Within this Stage, the Party, still young, audaciously decides to assault the skies: the People‘s Armed Uprising of 1935, through the National Liberation Alliance, as a democratic anti-feudal, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist united front, under the guidance of the Cominter and guided by its grandiose 7. Congress. The P.C.B., thus, integrates the Anti-Fascist World United Front, directed by the great Stalin, in the context of the preparations of the whole international proletariat for the great patriotic war, to defend the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin and the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bestial aggression that the Nazi war machine was preparing.
Despite this extraordinary achievement, after conquering power in Rio Grande do Norte, the Uprising failed nationally, because, mainly, the party did not understand the role of the peasantry and did not move its cadres to unite with it in the struggle for land and, in it, build the revolutionary Army of workers and peasants that could firmly establish the Power of the united front, under the direction of the proletariat, as had been oriented by the Cominter.
In his report to the 7. Congress of the Cominter, the great Bulgarian Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, thus points out the development of the ANL before the insurrection: "In Brazil, the Communist Party, which has built a correct basis for the development of the anti-imperialist united front with the foundation of the National Liberation Alliance, must make every effort to extend this front still further and attract, first and foremost, the masses of millions of peasants for the purpose of guiding them in the formation of units of the revolutionary people's army devoted to the end to the establishment of the power of the National Liberation Alliance" (emphasis added). A lesson that the party did not assimilate, causing the defeat of the Uprising.
The P.C.B., then, was practically disorganized by the strong repression that was unleashed after the uprising, and soon deepened with the coup d'état of Getúlio Vargas in 1937, which created the New State (In the original”Estado Novo” - The Trasl.) of fascist type, aligning itself with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.
The balance of the '35 Uprising, only carried out a decade later, in which the errors were taken as the main aspect, served to strengthen the right in the party, which was influenced by the contemporary revisionist theses of Earl Browder (secretary of the Communist Party of the USA). In the P.C.B., headed by Prestes and in the context of the end of the Estado Novo with the overthrow of Vargas by the Army High Command and the "return of democracy" to the country under the government of the Americanophile Gaspar Dutra, the prevailing theses are "national unity in war and peace" and that, with the legalization of the P.C.B. by the electoral court, "bourgeois democracy has turned to the left". Positions that, in truth, were preaching the electoral parliamentary path (participation in the Constituent Assembly), of constitutional illusions, and of the rejection of the armed struggle.
It did not take three years for Yankee imperialism, strengthened as the most powerful imperialist power and with worldwide reach after the war, to confront the growth of the socialist camp, to unleash in Brazil, through General Dutra, a new regime of anti-communist terror. The P.C.B. is severely hit at the end of the 1940s, demonstrating the falsity of Prestes' theses and of the right wing in the party, which forces the whole party to a self-criticism that lays more foundations for the revolutionary line, mainly with the Manifestos of January 1948 and August 1950.
With these Manifestos, the party reaffirms the need for armed struggle, for clandestine construction and rejects constitutional illusions, as well as rejects the alliance with the big bourgeoisie represented by Vargas, although rightist deviations prevail regarding the armed struggle (failure to understand the peasantry as the main force of the Brazilian revolution and the agrarian revolution as a way to build the conditions for the armed democratic revolution), and also "leftists", by not distinguishing the big bourgeoisie from the middle bourgeoisie.
The two line struggle, with the left becoming more conscious of the need to fight reformism, gains momentum. In this period there were important armed struggles of peasants for access to land, led by regional or local sections of the P.C.B., even during Vargas' second government (elected again in 1950, whose government was marked by nationalist measures of the bureaucratic fraction, that, although they did not break with imperialism, were part of the struggle of the fractions of the local big bourgeoisie, and therefore confused many popular sectors). Such peasant armed struggles were greatly underestimated by the entire central leadership of the party and in the end were all channeled once again toward electoral opportunism and the old reactionary state.
After Getúlio Vargas' suicide in 1954, as an act to create commotion in the face of the attempts by Yankee imperialism and the comprador faction of the big bourgeoisie to overthrow him, the party that in its IV Congress (1954-55) had maintained the swing to the left since the Manifestos of 1948 and 1950, takes a new turn to the right and to reformism, once again considering Vargas as the representative of the national bourgeoisie and supporting Juscelino Kubitschek as the representative of this bourgeoisie, even getting on his electoral campaign wagon.
All this rightist formulation gains international support and reinforcement during the following years, when the 20. (1956), 21. (1959) and 22. (1961) Congresses of the CPSU took place, congresses of betrayal of socialism, in which Kruschov launched the theses of modern revisionism, that were summarized by Chairman Mao Tsetung as the "Two Wholes and Three Peacefuls", respectively "All People's State and All People's Party" and "Peaceful Coexistence, Peaceful Emulation and Peaceful Transition". In short, achieving Socialism by the parliamentary and peaceful path. In Brazil, the right wing of the party headed by Prestes, in convergence with Kruschov, will make the most complete systematization of revisionism in the country, in the Declaration of March 1958.
In that Declaration, the revisionists of the party will defend that the "anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolution" will come "through the gradual but incessant accumulation of deep and consequential reforms in the economic structure and in political institutions, arriving at the complete realization of radical transformations". They openly defend collaboration with the dominant classes: "In the present conditions of our country, capitalist development corresponds to the interests of the proletariat and of all the people", going so far as to state that it was necessary to constitute a united front "with sectors of owners of the latifundium that have contradictions with US imperialism", without mentioning anything concrete for the peasant struggle.
In this context, the 5. Congress takes place (1960), two years after the Declaration, where there are more confrontations between the right and the left in the leadership of the P.C.B., but where Prestes' revisionist line is fundamentally guaranteed. A year later (1961), the right-wing line deepens, changing the statutes and even the name of the PCB to Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party), to guarantee its legalization by the Superior Electoral Court. This attitude awakens hundreds of cadres to the task of making a clear split between Marxist-Leninists and revisionists, beginning with the "Charter of the Hundred" the reconstruction of 1962, being soon influenced by the great international struggle against modern revisionism, publicly unleashed in 1963 with the publication of the famous "Chinese Charter", a struggle led, already by then, by Chairman Mao Tsetung.
Constitution of the Party as truly Marxist-Leninist
Thus opens the Third Stage, in which the struggle against revisionism is taken up. Led by important Marxist-Leninist cadres, such as Maurício Grabois, Pomar, Carlos Danielli, Lincoln Oest, Calil Chadi and others, the split will establish for the first time the party - now under the acronym PCdoB - as an authentic Marxist-Leninist party, in order to come closer to the Mao Tse-tung Thought. This stage will be subdivided into two distinct phases, the First one from the Reconstruction to the liquidation of the PCdoB as a Marxist-Leninist party in the way ofMao Tse-tung by the revisionist clique of Amazonas with the defeat of the Araguaia Guerrilla. A second phase is the struggle for the reconstitution of the P.C.B, which is still going on today.
In the PCdoB, in the first years after breaking with the revisionism of Prestes, due to problems in handling internal contradictions - due to the prevalence of the legacies of opportunism in its ranks - many groups of communists who defended leftist positions were isolated, punished, and expelled, while others split away due to the administrative method in handling contradictions. Through conforming factions inside and outside the PCdoB, the correct and necessary two-line struggle was blocked by the Central Committee, preventing the great advance that the left could have achieved at that moment, producing serious damage to the party and the Brazilian revolution.
Among the fractions, the PCR of Amaro Luiz de Carvalho, the Capivara and Manoel Lisboa, the PCdoB-Ala Vermelha etc. stand out. All these factions will seek in Mao Tse-tung Thought and in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution the torch to illuminate the path of the Brazilian revolution and will advance in its assimilation, defending the path of the People‘s War.
At the same time, in the PCBrasileiro of Prestes, after the 1964 coup and its complete shutdown, new splits of revolutionary cadres emerged against the oportunist leadership, but the vast majority took the path of "Focism" and "Guevarism", in short, petty-bourgeois militarism, rejecting party building. This was the case of the PCBR, ALN, VPR, MR8, PRT, etc. Some of these processes of will later make self-criticism concerning the Fokist way and take efforts to reach the line of the brazilian revolution.
But in the period, the most important achievement in the resistance and combat against the fascist military regime, even with its problems of method of direction, is headed by the PCdoB. On April 12, 1972, alerted about subversive activities in the region of the lower Araguaia, the reactionary Army attacks the revolutionary detachments and the first guerrilla combats take place in the region known as Bico do Papagaio, a confluence of the borders of the states of Pará, Goiás (today Tocantins) and Maranhão, on the banks of the Araguaia. The Araguaia Guerrilla War had begun, a great event in the history of the people‘s resistance in our country, not only for the unforgettable heroism of its militants, but for having been the decision of the Party to open the path of the People‘s War in Brazil.
Although defeated, more than three years after its beginning and facing three great campaigns of siege and annihilation by the reactionary Armed Forces, the Araguaia Guerrilla deeply marked the peasant masses of the region. The cause of its defeat lies mainly in what comrade Pedro Pomar analyzed as a misconception of the theory of people‘s war and its derived consequences for the party - its militarization, as a necessity to lead it - and for the other instruments of the revolution. And beyond that, the underlying cause was the formalist adoption of Mao Tse-tung thought, due to the strong resistance from the right wing, which insisted on mixing and matching the strategy of the people's war with opportunist tactics. Finally, one of the consequences of the formalist adoption was the failure to understand the method of the two-line struggle, which prevented the Party leadership from further forging the assimilation of Mao Tse-tung Thought (as Maoism was understood at the time), because of the subjectivism of a dogmatic type within the leadership.
The left in the leadership of the PCdoB, which was already deeply weakened by the loss of Maurício Grabois and dozens of cadres in the Araguaia and in the cities, will receive a definitive blow with the fall of the Central Committee meeting in December 1976. The episode known as the Chacina da Lapa (Slaughter of the Lapa) - in fact an event resulting from the denunciation of high party leaders who opposed to the revolutionary line of the people's war - constituted an "Operation Capitulation". With the execution of the three remaining leftist cadres in the party leadership (Pedro Pomar, Ângelo Arroyo and João Baptista Drummond), the assessment of the Araguaia experience, which the Amazonian right wing feared would be carried to its conclusion, was interrupted.
Pedro Pomar and Ângelo Arroyo were shot right there, in the security house where the CC was meeting; the former was shot more than 70 times despite the fast that he was unarmed. João Baptista Drummond was killed during torture.
Later, the fight for a correct balance of the Araguaia experience was buried by a thousand opportunistic maneuvers by João Amazonas and his clique. The latter, manipulating the Party and scheming with some cadres to change their position, sank the organization into the "ostrich politics", hid behind the revisionist Enver Hodxa to attack Chairman Mao Tse-tung as a justification for abandoning the revolutionary line of the People's War and wallowing in the electoral path. Of all the revisionist factions and leaders, this Mr. João Amazonas, a minuscule figure only capable of provoking intrigues and machinations, incapable of any self-criticism, has disowned all those he had said he would follow; he bears the title of main traitor to the cause of the proletariat in the country, just like the new revisionist party he created under the continuity of the acronym PCdoB.
The struggle for the Reconstitution of the P.C.B.
Thus follows the history of the P.C.B. as the Second Phase of its Third Stage, which runs through the years 1980/1990, still in course, as a stage in which the Party, divided into many fractions and in the atmosphere of almost complete liquidation of the revolutionary movement, struggles to reconstitute itself as an authentic Communist Party of Brazil, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, corresponding to the needs of the revolution at that time and in that country, to fight for the conquest of Power, inevitably, as a Prolonged People‘s War, for the proletariat and the people‘s masses, in the Revolution of New Democracy, uninterrupted to Socialism, as part and in the service of the World Proletarian Revolution, towards the luminous Communism.
A struggle that takes place in the context of a prolonged and complex period of counterrevolutionary offensive of a general character and made of desperate attacks against Marxism, against the Party, against revolutionary violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat; a period in which, in the world, there is the decay of Russian social-imperialism and the end of social-imperialist USSR, capitalist restoration in China, the rise of Yankee imperialism as the sole hegemonic superpower, the theories of the "end of history", "globalization", "new technologies as the engine of social transformations", post-modernism in its multiple forms, everything to embellish the unprecedented decomposition of imperialism.
In this context, as a bonfire of hope, the People's War was unleashed in Peru, led by the Communist Party of Peru under the leadership of President Gonzalo - who defined Maoism as a new, third and higher stage of development of the ideology of the international proletariat, initiating the general Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary counteroffensive, contributions of universal validity of President Gonzalo, raising high the banner of Maoism and the People's War. President Gonzalo and the People's War in Peru gave the communists of the world the task of raising Maoism as the sole command and guide of the World Proletarian Revolution, through constituting/reconstituting militarized communist parties to unleash people's wars in more and more countries, raising to new heights the New Great Wave of world revolution that has already begun.
In this Second Phase of the Third Stage of the history of the P.C.B., according to the publications of the Nucleus of Studies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that reach our editorial staff, the struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Party of Brazil as an authentic Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party, mainly Maoist, has been set in motion, a militarized party, directed for 27 years by its Red Fraction, in the midst of clandestinity and building the three fundamental instruments of the Revolution concentrically and simultaneously, everything to culminate the Third Stage of the history of the P.C.B. and open the new and Fourth Stage, that of the prolonged people's war for carrying out the Revolution of New Democracy, uninterrupted to Socialism, as part and service of the World Proletarian Revolution as World People's War, and with successive proletarian Cultural Revolutions all the peoples of the world enter the luminous Communism.
